This volume includes many of the best essays by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), one of the most original scholars of Russian culture of her generation. Nepomnyashchy’s broad interests ranged from Pushkin to contemporary Russian popular culture. Her work speaks to issues that remain central to Slavic studies today, including imperialist impulses and rhetoric in Russian culture; the resiliency and post-Soviet afterlife of Stalinist mythic and cultic formulas; and problems connected with dissent, censorship, and displacement. In addition to some of Nepomnyashchy’s best previously published scholarly work, this volume includes excerpts from The Politics of Tradition: Rerooting Russian Literature After Stalin, the book manuscript that Nepomnyashchy was working on in the last years of her life.

In 1937, the Soviet Union mounted a national celebration commemorating the centenary of poet Alexander Pushkin's death. Though already a beloved national literary figure, the scale and feverish pitch of the Pushkin festival was unprecedented. Greetings, Pushkin! presents the first in-depth study of this historic event and follows its manifestations in art, literature, popular culture, education, and politics, while also examining its philosophical underpinnings. Jonathan Brooks Platt looks deeply into the motivations behind the Soviet glorification of a long-dead poet—seemingly at odds with the October revolution's radical break with the past. He views the Pushkin celebration as a conjunction of two opposing approaches to time and modernity: monumentalism and eschatology. Monumentalism—in pointing to specific moments and individuals as the origin point for cultural narratives, and eschatology—which glorifies ruptures in the chain of art or thought, and the destruction of canons. In the midst of the Great Purge, the Pushkin jubilee was a critical element in the drive toward a nationalist discourse that attempted to unify and subsume the disparate elements of the Soviet Union, supporting the move to "socialism in one country".

'She turned into a frog, into a lizard, into all kinds of other reptiles and then into a spindle' In these tales, young women go on long and difficult quests, wicked stepmothers turn children into geese and tsars ask dangerous riddles, with help or hindrance from magical dolls, cannibal witches, talking skulls, stolen wives, and brothers disguised as wise birds. Half the tales here are true oral tales, collected by folklorists during the last two centuries, while the others are reworkings of oral tales by four great Russian writers: Alexander Pushkin, Nadezhda Teffi, Pavel Bazhov and Andrey Platonov. In his introduction to these new translations, Robert Chandler writes about the primitive magic inherent in these tales and the taboos around them, while in the afterword, Sibelan Forrester discusses the witch Baba Yaga. This edition also includes an appendix, bibliography and notes. Translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler With Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin and Olga Meerson

Todd describes the ideology of the educated westernized gentry, then charts the possibilities for literary life: first patronage, the salons, popular literature; then rapid emergence of an incipient literary profession. He explores the interactions of literature and society as writers "discovered" their own milieu and were discovered by it.

Alexander Pushkin's four compact plays, later known as The Little Tragedies, were written at the height of the author's creative powers, and their influence on many Russian and Western writers cannot be overestimated. Yet Western readers are far more familiar with Pushkin's lyrics, narrative poems, and prose than with his drama. The Little Tragedies have received few translations or scholarly examinations. Setting out to redress this and to reclaim a cornerstone of Pushkin's work, Evodokimova and her distinguished contributors offer the first thorough critical study of these plays. They examine the historical roots and connective themes of the plays, offer close readings, and track the transformation of the works into other genres. This volume includes a significant new translation by James Falen of the plays-"The Covetous Knight," "Mozart and Salieri," "The Stone Guest," and "A Feast in Time of Plague."

The reexamination of values that began during the USSRs last years continues today in the search for a new Russian culture, one rooted in the pre-Soviet past but dynamic and evolving. Multi-textual, polyphonic, and contradictory, the current Russian cultural discourse is richly reflected in these essays by a diverse group of authors from Russian and American academic and cultural circles. The chapters explore specific cultural domains, surveying Russian and Soviet beliefs and behaviors, and highlighting the range of choices that Russians are facing at this critical juncture. }During the waning years of Soviet power, glasnost laid bare the distress of people trapped in a system they despised but felt powerless to change. The reexamination of values that began then continues today in the search for a new Russian culture, one rooted in the pre-Soviet past but dynamic and evolving, enabling Russians to meet the challenges they face in the contemporary world. Multi-textual, polyphonic, and contradictory, the current Russian cultural discourse is richly reflected in these essays by a diverse group of authors from Russian and American academic and cultural circles. Each chapter focuses on a particular cultural domain, surveying the historical origins of Russian beliefs and behaviors, exploring their Soviet and post-Soviet permutations, and highlighting the range of choices that Russians are facing at this critical juncture. The decisions they make will shape their society and culture for generations to come.Illuminating the universal significance of the Soviet experience, this volume raises provocative questions about the social, political, and economic sources of cultural change.

Pushkin’s status as the founding father of Russian literature owes much to his stylistic and linguistic innovations across a wide range of literary genres. But equally important is the influence he exerted on his successors via his exploitation of myth in its widest sense. His poetry, prose and drama frequently draw upon myths of classical antiquity, myths of modern European culture – grand narratives such as the Don Juan legend and Dante’s Inferno – as well as uniquely Russian myths, particularly those associated with St Petersburg and its founder Peter the Great. It was through the elaboration of such myths that Russia attained to a sense of both its cultural uniqueness and its inscription in the broader context of European culture. The contributors to Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument explore these myths from a variety of critical viewpoints and highlight the specific ways in which Pushkin uses myth – among these his recurrent emphasis on the symbolism of monuments and statuary, famously referred to by Roman Jakobson as Pushkin’s ‘sculptural myth’. Alexander Pushkin: Myth and Monument is the second volume devoted to Pushkin published in the SSLP series, the first being Pushkin’s Secret: Russian Writers Reread and Rewrite Pushkin. A third volume – Pushkin’s Legacy will follow.